KDE 4.0 Beta 4 Released

“The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. As KDE has largely has been in bugfix mode, this latest Beta aims to encourage testers to have a look at it to help us find and solve the remaining problems and bugs. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell. Sebastian Kugler notes: ‘The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle.’“

96 Comments

for me to download and compile the little beast. And so should you! Especially if that fugly taskbar panel pisses you off, or if you find Dolphin to be a feature-neutered bastard child of Konqueror and Finder, or expect KWin to be embarrassingly unable to match Compiz Fusion – this is you chance to make a difference 🙂

Edit: For those humor-less people who mods down comments you do not understand at first sight, what the above means in clear text is: don’t just sit around here at OSNews and complain about stuff you do not like in some arbitrary screenshot, download it and give constructive feedback to the KDE devs! And that goes for you Windows/Mac users as well 🙂

I agree, this has got to be one of the ugliest UI’s in existence. It almost seems like they have stepped back in time to develop this, meaning this looks more appropriate for 1998. After become less and less thrilled with Gnome in Opensuse (the menu system is horrid) I switched back to KDE after many years of using Gnome. In the latest 10.3 OpenSuse I installed KDE4 Preview, and what I saw was not something that should ever be released. It seemed more like the UI was created by one individual, with no user input, who had never designed a UI before, and frankly was not skilled to do so.

This UI is amateurish at best. I understand that it would be an excellent idea to let the KDE team know this, and I have. But I highly doubt this is going to change, or at least I have no confidence it will. This is frankly, in my opinion, a disaster. To avoid this becoming a complete joke and embarrassment they will need to overall this UI completely. This is not a step forward, more like 50 steps backward. I really can accept how something this awful could get to this late stage.

But I highly doubt this is going to change, or at least I have no confidence it will.

Everything else you say is understandable at this point, but you have be absolutely ignorant of the technical foundations of KDE4 and Plasma to suggest that the UI is going nowhere.

KDE4 has nothing but potential, and I mean that in the most literal sense. Its current state reflects the fact that less than 10% of the overall work has gone into the UI. The above quoted statement is the equivalent of saying that Python is an awful programming language because all my first program does is display “Hello World!”.

KDE4 probably won’t compete with KDE3 or GNOME2 as a desktop UI for another 6-12 months. But as a desktop development platform, it blows them out of the water today. That’s why the UI is going to develop rapidly, with an unprecedented amount of diversity and participation. That’s why KDE4 will scale up to media centers and down to smartphones better than any other desktop framework.

To avoid this becoming a complete joke and embarrassment they will need to overall (sic) this UI completely.

That’s what this whole KDE4 process was about. They decided that the time was right to abandon their aging codebase derived from KDE2 and undertake a complete rewrite to position KDE for a new era of the free software desktop. It is a complete overhaul, bringing the freshest and most innovative free software technology to market just as the business dynamics in the client space are beginning to shift.

What is means to be a “desktop environment” is changing as the PC and post-PC client takes on new sizes, shapes, and roles. KDE4 is a bold attempt to take the desktop wherever it wants to go over the next decade, and I believe that it’s an approach that will pay off decisively.

I’m sorry. I just had to look up the screenshot in the announcement. Look at it, reread your comment, look at it again.

This can’t be serious comment. I mean, back to the 1998? You mean Windows ’98? Yeah, sure. Alphablending was a dirty word, back then, as where rounded corners. Big grey-land.

If you would play with Oxygen, the new KDE 4 look, you would quickly discover it is much more colorful as it seems at first sight. Yet very light on the eyes. Personally, I’m really happy with the look. After having been in KDE 4 for a while, I find it unpleasant to come back to KDE 3 – no matter which style I choose – polyester, plastik, domino, baghira, qtcurve – I’ve gone through all of them since I’ve been really running KDE 4, and they’re not satisfactory compared to Oxygen.

KDE 4 really needed more people testing it, so we decided to release another beta. Nothing can be really set in stone, KDE 4.0 won’t be smashing, but it should be usable. So we won’t release until it is.

Dropping features isn’t really possible with this release – next one will be more tightly scheduled 😉

The one thing I still don’t think Linux has gotten yet is the “smooth, slick” look that Mac has.

The fonts for one thing is a detractor. I instantly change the fonts over to give more of that smooth look and feel to it.

There is a lot of potential here, and I don’t advocate copying the Mac interface, but it could be an outstanding interface if it were analyzed from a visual UI point of view. GNOME has the same issue; functional, but not smooth.

“The one thing I still don’t think Linux has gotten yet is the “smooth, slick” look that Mac has. ”

I’m only vaugly interested but what isn’t slick provide an example. Any example.

Linux has 2/3 fully functional desktops and they have all looked smooth/slick for a long time, KDE has always looked “smooth, slick” with defaults, and had a million ways to customize it to your tastes.

The font used is jagged and raw looking, not as smooth in appearance as Mac fonts are. It detracts from the icons and menu bars, which admittedly look better in KDE 4 than before.

GNOME has the same issue to me; I instantly change the font when I load Ubuntu. While I understand that you can change things and customize easily, for a new user, first impressions are important.

The biggest complaint about KDE I have is that much of both the icons and the UI look very cartoony and not slick.(Admittedly XP looks the same; much like a Fisher-Price toy) I have to admit that KDE 4 has improved that quite a bit.

Some people, apparently you are one of them, are really put off by fonts. I didn’t understand it until I did some reading – I guess you don’t like fonts on MS either? Mac OS X, Windows and linux each use different kinds of rendering (the one linux uses is rather configurable, btw). If you’re used to one, chances are you simply won’t like the others.

Personally, I hate font rendering on the mac – way to fuzzy. And windows fonts are often bleeding colors, I don’t like them either… But I’ve been using non-subpixel hinted font antialiassing for years, love it.

Some people, apparently you are one of them, are really put off by fonts.

Fonts are one example I used. To me they are a focal part of a good looking UI.

I guess you don’t like fonts on MS either?

The standard fonts, no. Too jagged and hard to read on LCD’s. Cleartype works much better.

Mac OS X, Windows and linux each use different kinds of rendering (the one linux uses is rather configurable, btw).

I wasn’t questioning being able to change it;I’m aware of the vast amounts of config you can do. I was questioning the “first impression” factor that most users would see on installing the OS.

Personally, I hate font rendering on the mac – way to fuzzy. And windows fonts are often bleeding colors, I don’t like them either… But I’ve been using non-subpixel hinted font antialiassing for years, love it.

Which was my point. you’re just used to a certain kind of fonts, and don’t like other fonts. Nothing anyone can ever do about that, except from exactly copying the look of the font you like – and that’s not just protected by patents, but also going to piss off many ppl who prefer the CURRENT linux fonts (cuz they are used to it).

So get over it, it’s not about ‘better or worse’ but about ‘I’m used to it’.

I don’t give a rusty f*** whether the AA of on-screen fonts aren’t satisfactory (they look right in either platform when configured correctly), but what I do give a rusty f*** about is stuff like XeTeX allowing me to leverage OpenType or TrueType fonts so I can produce publish quality manuscripts, journal articles, novels, etc.

I care that my PDFs are press quality. Whether someone’s Xorg config and fontconfig setups are different than the next person’s doesn’t matter to me.

If I’ve got them configured correctly Freetype 2.3 gets better with every release and so does OS X’s font system.

If you think OS X’s fonts are blurry and low quality then you don’t understand the Print Industry.

If you think OS X’s fonts are blurry and low quality then you don’t understand the Print Industry.

I don’t work in the print industry and I would guess that most people using Mac’s don’t work in the print industry. I would also guess that most people in Apples Mac target market don’t work in the print industry.

Having got that out the way I really hate fonts on the Mac. And I used Tiger for over a year. The font’s don’t look clean and crisp. If the print industry likes fonts on the Mac thats fine just don’t tell us that because the print industry likes blurry fonts that we have to want them. Apple pandering to a minority without caring about the majority of its users is typical Apple.

“Apple pandering to a minority without caring about the majority of its users is typical Apple.”

The minority? 99% of the print industry use Macs… Its hardly a minority of users, since OSX had PDF support throughout its ideal for this sort of work…! And these sort of people demand the best font rendering, so apple provides it – Mac font rendering is supposed to be the closest thing to a printed output – so that designers can easily proof their work.

And finally, I also have a Mac Mini with Tiger and I dont think the Fonts are blurry, I do however think that the FreeType fonts on my Linux box aren’t that great… I like the BitStream fonts but they don’t have the same sort of “professional” look that most OSX fonts have, plus for some reason distros allways set font size too large, 10 looks rediculous… Never had that problem with any other OS than Linux tbh.

True, most of the print industry might use Macs, but the vast majority of Mac users don’t belong to the print industry. They’re generally ordinary people who couldn’t give 2 flying hoots about the print industry. They use Macs so they’re stylish, cool, relatively easy to use, and generally safer than MS Windows from viruses etc. Plus there’s the bragging material of “I own a Mac!”.

Oh, and whilst I’ve only used up to 10.3.8, I think the Mac fonts are blurry. I’ll give you a tip – if they look blurry, they are.

Dave

PS I have 20/20 vision. Photography is a serious hobby for me, I think I can trust my eyes.

That is not logical, just because 98% of the print industry uses Macs doesn’t mean that 98% of the Mac user base is in the print industry. It’s possibly under 5% of total users (I have no idea what the real percentage is).

I prefer a system that is adjustable to my needs, not a system setup for a small percentage of the user base and no way to change it.

If you think OS X’s fonts are blurry and low quality then you don’t understand the Print Industry.

Maybe he’s like the majority of the worlds population and don’t give a damn about the print industry but cares about how the fonts look on his screen. You know, the fonts he actually reads every single day when using his computer.

Maybe he’s like the majority of the worlds population and don’t give a damn about the print industry but cares about how the fonts look on his screen. You know, the fonts he actually reads every single day when using his computer.

Windows and Macs have different philosophies on how they render fonts. Microsoft does a lot to make them legible on the screen, but sometimes they look different to what you actually print out which ruins the whole WYSIWYG concept that GUIs are based on. On the other hand, Apple keeps true to the WYSIWYG concept with the caveat that screen fonts don’t always look as legible as they could.

Just for the sake of accuracy, Linux isn’t responsible for font rendering at that level. The people at FreeType (http://freetype.sourceforge.net/index2.html) are the ones you’d probably want to voice those concerns to.

Who cares if its fully themeable, it should be done correctly first time… And It does look pretty awful… the titlebar buttons just make me cringe… Looks like a bad WindowBlinds skin from 2002…

Just my opinion, just because its skinnable doesn’t mean work shouldn’t be put in to get it right <first time>… Personally I like GNOME and so won’t be switching, I’ve allways found KDE to be a messy bloated GUI that was a bit too windowsesque for me but I suppose each to their own…!

Just my opinion, just because its skinnable doesn’t mean work shouldn’t be put in to get it right <first time>… Personally I like GNOME and so won’t be switching, I’ve allways found KDE to be a messy bloated GUI that was a bit too windowsesque for me but I suppose each to their own…!

So, in other words,

you don’t use it and will never use it, but you nevertheless took it upon you to come here and tell us that you don’t like it and will never like it.

THere are legitimate complaints that occur in these discussions, but by and large, most of the non legit ones are simply people that have nothing better to do than bash a release they will never even touch because they are biased to begin with. Then they act all shocked when their needs are not catered to

Personally I like GNOME and so won’t be switching, I’ve allways found KDE to be a messy bloated GUI that was a bit too windowsesque for me but I suppose each to their own…!

KDE’s “messy bloated GUI” (as how YOU describe it) is great for getting work done. Gnome has a fantastic interface for non computer people who want to email friends and occasionly surf the web and dont mind opening new applications to do what you can do with a right click in KDE.

Still you can sit back happy and relax knowing that in 10 years gnome will still be looking exactly the same and, if you’re really lucky, the devs will have removed even more of that ugly, bloated functionality stuff – just the way you like it!

Seriously, GNOME’s GUI organization is much better than KDE. It’s clean and simple compare to the complexity of KDE in terms of menu organization and control panel. KDE menu and control panel is more really a lot more complex than it should. They should really learn from GNOME for that.

That said, I do like KDE 4 better for is more modern UI design. But still, it holds me back from switching because of the messy and more than neccessary complexity for menu and control.

While certainly true in some areas, in the general case: why? So Gnome people will switch? You claim you might but I bet most Gnome people are happy with Gnome. Seriously, my concern is that they are trying too hard to appeal to Gnome users and I don’t like it. I use KDE because it isn’t Gnome. If it becomes Gnome, why wouldn’t I just use Gnome? At least that way I wouldn’t have to deal anymore with the odd app that uses a different toolkit(nvidia-settings, eclipse, etc)

I’ll be (very pleasantly) surprised if they attract significant numbers of Gnome users, but in what seem like their attempts to do so they alienate at least some (I count as part of “some”) KDE users.

I for one am probably stuck with KDE no matter what they do, since at least Konqueror and Dolphin have a directory tree view (personal preferences dictate the presence of one). I’m just not thrilled with the direction I perceive them to be taking, and which you (as a non-KDE user I might add) are advocating.

Example: all that constant harping (not necessarily by you) about all the “ugly” Ksomething application names. Well it’s gone to their head, and sensible, descriptive stuff like KHexEdit is being replaced by Okteta. Thanks a lot. One can still see a connection with its function (and it still has a k) but the function is far less obvious. I eagerly await the renaming of kwite to skratchpad

I really can’t say it’s not for the best in the long run. It may benefit KDE greatly. My concerns have mainly to do with my preferences and likes. That should be obvious, but people sometimes flip out if one doesn’t make it clear one is expressing personal opinions

I guess it is the translucent windows or edges (eg on the desktop panel in the screenshot provided) which are a little reminiscent of windows vista. This seems to be the way that most of the major desktops seem to be going – windows, OSX, KDE – maybe with the exception of Gnome?

I think it looks promising. I’ve never really liked the look of KDE – the toolbar always seemed to take up too much space (which is the same) and the icons and colours always seemed a bit too harsh. There is something a bit more attractive about this look to me.

I found it doubtfull that you have a pdf bug with Krita using poppler 0.6.1, because it can’t yet build against poppler 0.6.1. So, maybe there is a bug in the build system allowing it do it and then a compilation error, if cmake insist on trying to build, can you contact us at kimageshop@kde.org with the error so that we can at least fix the build ?

Visually things are improving, but I’m still confused on the task bar. It’s got a blueish purple to dark grey horizontal gradient. Is this subject to change or is that how it was intended? I know the task bar is WIP, but I’ve seen Oxygen improve each release, but the bar has remained the same.

I think people are not used to seeing big changes in betas so they assume it’s going to look like that in the final version. Beta is usually bug fixing, testing and not missing icons all over the place, task bar looking fudgy.

I understand your changing this throughout the betas but alot of people dont, so forgive the people saying it dont look good or finished for a beta.

Well, we’ve tried to communicate this for months: 99% of KDE is in beta, but Plasma and some other parts should be considered more like Alpha. These components are showstoppers for 4.0, and we’re working very hard to get them ready.

KDE4 still has a lot of potential thats not yet realized so I think we all need to be patient and if we can help out, do so.

I’ll be testing it out as soon as I can and hopefully I can aid in submitting bug reports. Its a chance to be part of possibly the most advanced open source desktop (just my opinion – not intended to be a troll).

I’m not a fan of widgets (in the konfabulator sense, not the Qt or GTK widget set sense). That being so, I’m not entirely thrilled to see so much of the KDE4 desktop made of them. The taskbar for example: of course it will improve, but I’d much prefer to see it done in Qt and matching whatever Qt style I am using. I don’t want a konfabulator widget for a taskbar. Or a pager or battery meter. I’m really not sold on plasma at all, and I don’t mean the implementation, I mean the concept.

Now, people with complaints are directed to give constructive feedback but I don’t think plasma is going to go away. It’s an integral aspect of KDE4 that I don’t like. Other people with complaints will be in a similar situation: disliking something that simply isn’t going to change (though the pleasant addition of a directory tree to Dolphin does give one a glimmer of hope sometimes). We either get to suck it up or use something else.

I’ll have to see what the final tally of annoyances is before I decide of course, I’m not going to be preemptive But I’m surprised to even be contemplating not using KDE anymore. I’m probably best advised to wait for 4.1 before giving it a shot. Then again, as a Debian user if stop using testing and go to stable, that could be years away

Well, I certainly hope plasma will be usable just like the old KDE 3 was. Kicker had applets too, you know. This time, you can drag’n’drop them to the desktop 😉

And there are some big differences between Plasma and widgets like the konfabulator ones. To name one, an unified theme (which could probably make you happy). And from KDE 4.1 on, you can use normal KDE/Qt widgets (buttons etc) on and in plasmoids. So it is much more a ‘best of both worlds’, I think.

Yeah, well – the author doesn’t quite get things right. There are several options he misses, and his explanations of font rendering in Mac OS X and Linux (FreeType2) is half wrong.

And his proposed solutions are only better when compared with font rendering on Windows. Besides that he is completely missing the conflict between intelligent (smart) font rendering engines and stupid font rendering engines.

He has some interesting ideas but most of it shows that he doesn’t grok fonts very well.

I must agree with the author that fonts look bit dirty rendered under Linux (noticed that even before reading the article). So it’s better ALSO compared to existing font rendering in Linux (article certainly isn’t favoring Windows font engine).

I read some critics on the article that it will conflict with pixel-precise definitions in HTML (->html could use other technique) and won’t work well with glyph caches (which I think is a price we can pay, especially with powerful CPU/GPU’s)

Don’t take this the wrong way the I’m not complaining about anything below I’m just listing concerns. If you read this after the release of KDE4 then I’m complaining 😉

I’ve read a lot about KDE4 technologies and it does sound like a good platform for Linux but I’m a bit concerned about the state of the GUi and the December release date. I should hope they are going to shape it up before release. It just looks very cheap. after seeing some of the concepts this current GUI does not look very polished at all… ruff edges missing gradients ugly toolbars + window decorations and the scroll bars and progress bars are butt ugly.

I’m hoping for this kind of polish but I don’t think so considering the dec release date. I’ve posted this many times but for those that have not seen this great mock-up.

get off my ass and install it, but I don’t think I’ll have the opportunity for a while. I’m wondering if kcontrol is simply going away, because I personally cannot stand the mac-ripoff “control center” and if it’s the new default, I imagine it’ll take some getting used to. I also still don’t get the kicker replacement – I have tried it out a few times and find it clumsy. That being said, with katapult getting better and better I rarely use kicker except for very specific things. I can’t seem to convince other people to use katapult, though, and I can forsee a lot of “No, it’s not like that anymore – here, look at this” conversations in my future.

I am impressed with the technology thats been built into KDE 4, the 4.0 release is really just getting the technology ready. After the 4.0 release I hope they make some serious usability improvments though.

The tilebar buttons have unclicable regions around them just like the original windows start button. They also stand out because of the shadow which is visually distracting. The titlebars aren’t visually distinct, its hard to tell which is the active window.

It will be neat to see what happens with it after a few point releases.

What people seem to forget is, as much as we want the desktop golden and fully polished, the plumbing for KDE 4.0 had/has to be worked out.

The Plasma API plumbing is still has some issues being hashed out but once those are addressed the framework will be all there to start implementing the rest of the panel components. We already have systray, pager, task bar (needs refining), launcher buttons (in progress), the actual Desktop mimicing what kdesktop did (in terms of icons on the desktop).

It’s not about how the panel looks like that matters; it’s about the APIs being ready to reimplement some components of our old friend kicker has to an extent 🙂

In fact, as of Yesterday Aaron just made big changes to the Krunner API so we can have a really metasearchable desktop in all sorts of zany forms.

I still think KDE4.0 isn’t even nearly as nice as people said it would be. After all this hype over Plasma and so on, I finally expected that this crazy ugly metal look would be gone, that fonts would be rendered much nicer and that it’d just be designed in a better way, but those icons are fugly, the way it’s layouted is amateurish, generally, I think Gnome looks much more professional, simpler, more streamlined, to the point.

Don’t want to start a flamewar here, but I really don’t think KDE has progressed all that much when it comes to a visual point of view. Still ugly, but shiny now.

And they always end with something to the effect of “…Gnome looks much more professional, simpler, more streamlined, to the point.”

Fine. You like Gnome. We get it. So before you feel compelled, yet again, to let us know how much better you think Gnome is than every DE in the universe, please do us all a favour, take a deep breath and click the ‘Back’ button.

When it’s finished…then we can debate the merits and deficiencies of both.

That’s like saying the Gimp is ‘finished’. It’s not. It’s constantly in development like everything else OSS.

It’ll be feature-locked, debugged and “released” in about 40 days.

But you’re right, 4.0 is targeted primarily at developers so they can put all that new technology to good use….but that’s been made clear from the start, so pretending to expect a 100% complete consumer desktop platform is disingenuous…

40 days, is exactly why I said I have little to no confidence that things will change. I find it simply both amazing and unacceptable the attitudes that most seem to take when input is given that is not glowing praise. This is happening more and more too frequently in the past few years, dissenting voices simply are flamed. Instead, it seems that all you are allowed to do now is just kneel and praise, regardless of how horrible an idea.

It is pretty obvious that if they had taken the time to do some research and gathered opinions in the first place, they would not have this UI as it is now. At least in most discussions I have seen, this desktop is not thought of highly.

I do not expect perfection, even for anything that is out of beta. What I am looking at is quite simply just the user interface as it is presented now. To be quite honest, this is a UI that should never have made it out of the idea stage. Consistency, flow, ergonomics, color scheme, etc.. just about every single aspect of what I see in the previews is just all wrong in a overall sense. What I really have to ask is if they ever did any research or study to find out how this UI would be responded to by users. I simply can not accept that they ever bothered to do this. If open source software is to compete with closed systems like Windows or OSX, then they have to accept that certain practices done by commercial vendors are done for a very good reason. Why you may not like Vista, but there is a reason why a good majority of people are more than satisfied with the OS.

I can tell you one reason, during the development stage they fund continuously focus groups to get users input on every aspect of the UI. The end result is a UI that is extremely functional. Linux fanboys can rant and rave all they want about this comment, but it is a cold hard reality that average users do find Windows very easy to work with for a very good reason. The effort was put in the first place to make the UI workable. Doesn’t matter a damn thing what people think of Microsoft etc.. this is the reality of this world

But as Hiev says, the “I’ll excuse them at any cost syndrome” is much too rampant these days. For an OSS project to be able to compete in today’s world, the attitudes of yesterday like the one above and the “well it’s good enough” simply do not cut it anymore. One reason why Ubuntu is finding a lot of success is not just because it is an “easy” OS to use, but also because it has a very functional UI to work with, especially the Gnome iteration (Have not used Kubuntu in ages, so I can not comment).

So what has bothered me so much is a desktop GUI that is about a month away that, in my opinion, is not moving forward. Whatever underlying technologies they have inserted are somewhat meaningless if the front end is an un-usable mess. I understand people can say “well it’s skinable, or themeable, etc..” But the point here is to release something that is spectacular from the onset. When I compare these screenshots to other interfaces we have today; SkyOS, Vista, OSX, Gnome, etc.. I do not feel that from what I see this 4 is anywhere close to being in the same boat. Yet in by every means it should be ahead of the curve.

It may very well be that come 2 months from now the final release will surprise me. Which would be a nice thing, as I stated earlier I have come to be quite annoyed with Gnome in Opensuse. The latest 10.3 does have KDE4 preview, which was not to my liking in the least bit which was disappointing. At some point a feature release of Suse is going to have KDE 4, and I personally consider my choice between bad and worse, which is sad because since 9.0 (Novell or Open, can’t remember) I have seen a steady progression of improvement I come to like a lot. I hope this gives a better understanding of why I feel the way I do, and in the end it is just one persons opinion.

What is it, exactly, that you find so horrible? You do a lot of complaining, but without any details. Bad icons? Ugly colors? Bad panel? All of the above? The goal of the 4.0 desktop is parity with what you can get in 3.x series, using all the new technologies they’ve created. 4.1 will be much improved and have new, researched ideas. Would you say the 3.x desktop is something “that should never have made it out of the idea stage”?

I knew that it’d piss off some people and I realize that it’s an open source project and all that, but the release is like a month away and if they change the design radically NOW, it’ll be even more hodepodge than it is now.

I’m a fan of Gnome cause they keep things simple, yet beautiful, KDE always had this ugly, ‘cheap metal’ design with icons that could come right out of Microsofts Design Team.

But let’s stop it right here – I know it’s not finished and it’s still in beta, but mark my words: Nothing revolutionary is going to happen anymore. Beta 4 is pretty much how the released version will look like and it’ll still be ugly. What KDE needs is a little less bling bling and a lot more subtle beauty that doesn’t get in the way of the user.

We’ll see how things end up – I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to rest my case.

This release/snapshot, now KDE 4.0 Beta 4, was previously called (on the KDE 4 schedule page) Release Candidate 1. It is nice to know that the release team made a pragmatic assessment and renamed the snapshot to Beta 4. Historically, the KDE project was overly optimistic about the schedule of KDE 4. I have a feeling that the final release will be delayed into January.